Sea Limited (NYSE:SE) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

As we shared previously, we truly and strongly believe that in the longer run, the competition on e-commerce, it doesn’t matter which angle you cut it and where you come from, it’s very much a business that’s focused on fundamentals. You need to serve your users as well at lowest cost possible. These are simple rules and principles that we follow. There are many ways to engage our users. There might be new ways to engage with them that we will be able to leverage. There are many different service points we can touch and also continue to improve. And there are also many cost points that we will continue to improve upon and these are the key competencies, I think that brought us here to the current position of strong market leadership with the lowest cost to serve a platform that allows us to be both market leader, but also profitable and one and only in Southeast Asia so far.

I think we will not give up that competitive moat and we’ll continue to strengthen that. From period-to-period, we may make decisions and execute based on what we see as appropriate opportunities in the market and make investments. And those investments can be significant. But we will continue to focus on our execution efficiency. And also in the longer run, everything we’re doing is continuing to strengthen our long-term profitability and market leadership. So those are the principles that we will always stick to in the long run.

Operator: Next question comes from Piyush Choudhary from HSBC.

Piyush Choudhary : Two questions. Firstly, on e-commerce. Within Shopee Asia, can you talk a little bit about where you see better growth opportunities and where you will invest kind of significantly more? And what is the outlook for Shopee Brazil? Can we expect more investments even in Shopee rest of the other markets and increasing losses there? Or would you aim to reach EBITDA breakeven in rest of markets first? And secondly, on gaming, can you give us some insights on the performance of Undawn post its launch? Is it trending above or below your expectation? And any update on Free Fire game in India?

Yanjun Wang : Thank you, Piyush. In terms of the Shopee Asia, the growth opportunities we are seeing, I shared earlier in terms of overall market conditions being conducive and consumption resilience. At the same time, we see new opportunities related to in particular live streaming and video content-based e-commerce that we are trying to capture. And outlook for Brazil remains strong. As we shared this in previous quarter, we continue to see Brazil as an important growth market for us in the long run and we will continue to invest in growth there. At the same time, we continue to focus on efficiency of growth. We see that on a quarter-on-quarter basis, we saw improvements in the EBITDA loss per order for Brazil as a result of our continuing improvement on cost efficiency, in particular in logistics now in Brazil.

We do believe this remains a long-term growth opportunity for us. For the other markets, they are relatively small for us outside of Asia and Brazil. And we believe they are — at this point, they are mostly contribution margin positive. So it doesn’t really require too much investment, but we will continue to observe all the markets’ progress down the road. Undawn has been launched and usually with a newly launched game, we first of all are focused on engaging with our user base and try to make sure we have a strong user base and good engagement level from these users. We would not be very much focused on monetization at the initial stage of the game and the performance is still awarding expectations so far. We don’t have any update on Free Fire in India at this point.